On Fri, 18 Jan 2002 03:00, Papo Napolitano wrote:

Thank you for answerring Kens original question.

The reason he asked the question under this Subject, and the other ~OT replies, are all relevant for this thread. The "which mta is the best?" is in the context of replacing courier-mta to fix a stupid "rule" that has a NEGATIVE impact of those responsible for installing and managing this software. It's a bizarre situation that I am compelled, even forced, to change software I am otherwise completely happy with, even excited about because it solved my greatest need to have authentication out of MySQL in a natural way without... dare I say, patches and hacks. Finally I can manage email resources for over a dozen servers and 6K clients sanely and was looking forward to exploring couriermlm next.

This issue is not going to go away. The more wisespread courier-mta becomes the MORE this is going to become an issue and even in this thread it's obvious quite a number of people avoid this "problem" by using a different MTA (as well as for other misc reasons).

The only argument I've seen for strict RFC compliant binary attachement checking is that it's "the right thing to do" and it _may_ allow client MUAs to crash. If that happens then the original sender and the recipient can be "blamed" for using lame software whereas the way things stand now... the MTA in the middle is FORCING a policy upon ISPs and their clients that squarely puts the MTA at "fault" as the culprit causing a "problem" where dodo clients pretty (and obnoxious) backgrounds and attachements do not appear as the client was led to expect. For me and others not using courier-mta, this is/was a show stopper. If the clients MUA happens to crash it's THEIR problem, get another MUA... the way things are now it is the ISP in the middles problem... get another MTA !

The answer is so shit simple it's almost embarrasing to have to even put it in words. If the official courier-mta distribution could apply a (what!) 4 line patch and offer a run-time config option to disable this checking then I suspect a lot more people could happily run courier-mta... and these contentious messages and threads will dissapear from this mailing-list.

As for postfix and exim, I'm sure they are fine MTAs but in our case our client data is firmly embedded in MySQL tables and I'm not prepared to undo that (it took 5 years to get it so) and I don't know if or how these other MTAs can do that whereas I do have sendmail setup to use the same tables and could switch back to it fairly easily. I would, however, much prefer to make a simple call (ie; my choice) to simply edit esmtpd and uncomment IGNORE_RFC2045=1 and have no more of these moronic complaints coming from our clients.